Air New Zealand’s 2017 Christmas ad

Now that I’m an Honorary Kiwi™, you’ll find a marginal increase in the number of items about New Zealand. But that’s okay, because Kiwis have a great sense of humor about nearly everything—especially themselves. This is the 2017 Christmas ad from Air New Zealand, and it spends no time touting the airline but a lot of time taking the mickey out of the Kiwi accent. And it’s pretty accurate, too, since apparently Santa isn’t from New Zealand.

How can you not love a country that produces ads like this? Be sure to see the final salutation.

29 Comments

When I saw this on FB I replied that I’m glad none of the children asked for decks. I thought it was hisrious but it may have been a bit too pervy for the content. 🙂

I actually didn’t notice all this stuff with the Kiwi accent. Probably from being exposed to it all my life. It is a weird phenomenon that I can’t hear my mom’s accent. I’m told others experience the same thing. To me she sounds Canadian but to others she doesn’t.

For me, it was southwestern Ireland that challenged my brain. I would have been happy to have 1/3 comprehension of the speech of middle age and older men. Women were easier to understand for some reason.

Many years ago, I, as a kiwi, was asked to give a talk about New Zealand to Wigan Middle School, not far from Orwell’s Wigan Pier. After regaling the 10 year old pupils for 10 minutes I asked for questions, the first being: do they speak English in New Zealand?

I love it and ‘ve viewed it
way too many times ! even sent it
to my detective nephew, my attorney nephew,
my attorney son and two daughters in law who
are first responders for sexual violence –
survivors.

Vowels in English are the nightmare of people like me, who were empirically learning and are using English mostly in written form. Kiwi accent doesn’t seems to me worse than other ones (wether Irish or Texan). When I’m looking a youtube video, I’m always using the automatic subtitles if available…and obviously the youtube algorithm has the same problems I have.
Sometimes I wish everybody would speak Italian or German…

When my wife and I rented a plane in NZ they wouldn’t let us fly without a kiwi instructor – copilot. There are reasons such as the fact that we foreigners are unfamiliar with all the divers environments. Another good reason is communication might be tricky since we found the accent of a controller might make instructions confusing.

I share a penchant for antipodean eloquence with you and your readers. (That Lamb advert was a gem.) In that vein I urge you to look at this youtube video of the Ibis song. Let me warn you in advance there are more than a few politically unfashionable words uttered, and scenes which may be offensive to your ornithological following, but hey, you get that.